Magic Lantern solved the EOS 7D puzzle!

Magic Lantern has been a great project for many Canon cameras out there. Magic Lantern extends the firmware of a camera and inserts extra features to the camera’s software. This great stuff was never available for the 7D… But now the “7D puzzle” was solved!

The 7D puzzle

Because the 7D has two Digic processors, the Magic Lantern crew was not able to run the Magic Lantern firmware additions on the 7D. Recently this puzzle was solved:

“Yes, that’s true. Our young team member g3gg0 did the impossible, and solved the 7D puzzle within days of receiving the camera from Trammell Hudson (on September 12).
Background: Trammell Hudson started to port Magic Lantern on 7D three years ago. While he was able to run user code using the firmware update procedure, he was not able to run it in parallel with Canon firmware – which was required for Magic Lantern to run as an add-on software, without replacing the main firmware. Since then, we had little or no idea about how to solve this puzzle, until last week, when g3gg0 had an Aha! moment and discovered how to load Canon firmware from autoexec.bin code.

The first analysis shows that porting is straightforward (more or less), and most features will work without major code changes, as Magic Lantern does not have to run on both DIGIC processors. Basic features such as zebra and focus peaking are already working, so you may expect an alpha version to be available soon. (source: Magic Lantern on 7D ? YES !

This is THE GREATEST news! I never really got into Magic Lantern, as my 7D obviously wasn’t supported. Now that it is, I am certainly planning to check it out once they have a stable version out. Stay tuned!